Oct 09, 2017 Public Utilities Board on 2017-10-09 9:00 AM

recognition for the hurricane support. Thank you members of the board as you know over the last four to six weeks the states of Texas along with many states along the southeast portion of our country have been affected by hurricanes Harvey and Irma and so Denton responded city of Denton responded to those disasters to assist in the cleanup efforts along with the saving of number of lives and rescues throughout the the flooding there and so I wanted to take a moment to as requested by the board to to recognize the number of those employees that participated we have a large group of folks that are here representing several city departments and so so apologize if employees come in and out it's just because of the larger group and the size of room that we have here so with that being said I'd like to bring Drew Huffman with wastewater utilities to be able to talk a little bit about what they all did I've got a few slides here that show some of the names of the names of the folks that participated and some of the pictures so again I don't want to get in the way of Drew's to let him come up and talk a little bit about what they did and what they experienced there and during the Hurricane Harvey efforts so hey how are you I'm Drew Huffman I'm the manager of the wastewater collections department and we were one of the besides for our course our fire and rescue teams we were one of the first from Public Works to go down to help with the hurricane relief and what we did is we we joined of course with the Public Works response team and our main focus was to help restore water and wastewater so we weren't there really to clean streets up or anything else we were there to get the water back on and the wastewater back flowing again so we went to three different towns while we were while we were actually deployed we went to Refurio Texas first which is a small town just north of Rockport where the hurricane actually hit where the ice storm went through it was about a her it was about a level two or category two whenever it did pass over Refurio most of the homes there were affected not a whole lot were blown down a lot of trees scattered everywhere but due to the the power outages and the the just the way the kind of the surge of the the storm went through Refurio it took their water system out and because of their aging infrastructure like most of our cities now they couldn't handle the surge of the water pressures on and coming back and forth so there were eight main water water breaks and this picture here on closest to me is we were in Refurio and so we took all our own equipment we did take supplies but for the most part we used the city supplies that we went to and so here we were fixing a water main break here in Refur io we also went to Lake Jackson and Lake Jackson had a lot of flooding Lake Jackson south of Houston and so it was it was taking a lot of flooding from the Brazos and what they call oyster Creek and so here on the right hand we were we started clearing drainage dishes for Lake Jackson and they were because of the flooding they had a lot of wastewater issues which is our specialty so here's another here's two more pictures here of us and Refurio it 's a pretty cool picture there we were working right next to the Chevrolet dealership and Refurio on the far right and they had they had hung American flags up you know on the front just to show their support and their their resilience to bring their city back so I just want to thank you and thank you for the opportunity for us to be able to go down there it was a great experience and then I know our guys had a great time we really came together we worked in long hours but you know we got up every morning and you know together and it was an awesome experience and just the hospitality that we had I will tell you one story we're here so the the picture on your furthest from me on your right or I'm sorry pictures closest to me over here we're fixing a water main break there we're getting ready to dig it up the water was coming out of the ground and we had the hole open we're next to the road of tracks and out of nowhere we had all the you know the street blocked off and out of nowhere our car pulls up and lady kind of pulls her car up sideways she runs out from the front runs to the back opens the back hatch and she pulls out two bags I brought you lunch thank you so much for coming so it was an awesome experience and I just want to thank my guys you know for coming we have Brian Meadows Rivers Earls Glenn Harrison and Byron Rashard also we had David Warren and William Hubert go with us those two couldn't be here today but I just want to thank them further and thank you for your support and allow us to go so thank you for going I came from a municipality myself and so I know how much is appreciated when somebody can go and help you out when you're overwhelmed like that and and thanks to your families because I know they're the support behind you too so thank you can I propose a standing ovation for these guys who I just I just want to say you know I know you guys in the work you do you're really humble about it but to me you're like doctors for the infrastructure of a city and you know just as we need our organs to live as individuals we need water functional water waste water electricity to function as a city so you guys are going in there like that group doctors without borders and you are fixing the infrastructure you know the organs of other cities and you do this here in our city every day so hats off to all of you thank you so much and then if the street strange food services and parks team could come in if you don't mind this is Keith Gabbard our street superintendent and you can see the names of the folks that participated in this effort on their team and then after this do we see a few slides as well I don't know Keith if you want to say anything about what you all did and and what you saw just a few moments for a few minutes and that way they can the board can recognize you all so and then there's two slides are you running the slider and want me to okay if I can get this to run we had a combined effort of streets drainage parks and one fleet service member we went to Vita Texas as you can see we assisted in large debris removal and we were fixing some different streets and helping them get access back to the community for the emergency vehicles and the citizens because they were totally devastated with floods it's an emotional thing until you actually see it you can see it on TV but you see it in person it really tugs on your heartstrings these guys did an excellent job we were able to help some of their vehicles were down due to the flooding so our fleet gentleman was assisting them and us as well so it was a I kind of skipped through those quickly that's not a I'm going back what that's not me sorry sorry I guess I should be looking at the screen yeah we had a large debris lot of large trees they had a lot of their equipment down and still without power everybody was extremely grateful that we were there and the guys did an exceptional job so and we greatly appreciate the opportunity to go down and assist that city of Eider so thank you okay thank you I know that you're the ones who have to clear the streets so everybody else can get in and do their job so I really appreciate what you 've done hopefully we never have to ask for that but that's why we do this we're as Texans and Americans that's why we do this thanks you guys are heroes to all of us I think and every day and what you do and thank you so much you you really save lives by what you do and you're humble about it but we admire you so much so oh and thanks to your families who supported you to go not sure if the it was a wide broad effort for the organization we also have a an employee from the police department that it was that was part of that process as well I don't think he could make it today but but he was part of the public information office component to assist and disseminating the information out to the communities about what was going on here's some photos that were provided for us of their emergency operations center and just keeping track of the storms and news media outlets etc and so as you can see it 's all hands on deck on the on the on the public information office fire department also deployed a number of crews down I don't know if they're here this morning many of them depending on their shifts but but they did quite a bit in regards to swift water rescues they actually were deployed prior to the storm come making landfall to be ready because knowing that the storm surge will be coming there needed to be an efforts to be able to rescue folks and and when you rescue when you rescue humans you also have to rescue pets and and that's one of those things that our employees are prepared for and so you can see there all the things that they did over 2,000 folks there at the bottom and 300 dogs so it is an effort that's a it's a full family effort there when you're removing them from their homes and it was quite a bit of an effort here there in the various parts of southeast Texas and here are some photos of what they the fire department did and then the last group to be recognized are the folks that actually they were not deployed down to southeast Texas they're actually deployed to Florida and so if the DME folks would please come in and as they're walking in I can briefly tell you that you know we were actually able to to through our interlocal agreements that we have with a variety of with the electrical utilities there in Florida were able to ramp up prior to the storm actually making land fall so several of these of these folks were deployed prior to the storm hitting and make their way down to Florida to assist in the in the cleanup efforts to restore power repair any utility poles that were that were fallen so if if Rowdy if you don't mind coming here and saying a little bit what you all did after this slide where it shows all the names there's a few slides that show some of the pictures of what you all saw okay they all like this side of the room better I guess. This is almost all of our group we had two individuals that were sick today I think it was because we told them that we were coming here and we were a little bit nervous about being up in front of the public so this is a list of the group that went we took a very seasoned group if you can see we took a lot of crew for them and a lot of senior linemen and we normally do that because of when you go on these hurricanes you don't know what to expect you're out of your element you're out there working on a system that you are not familiar with you're working with another group of employees from that utility that you're not familiar with so you want your most seasoned people there doesn't mean we don't take some apprentices every once in a while to give them that experience also. We were called by FMEA Florida Municipal Electric Association about five days prior to landfall they called and asked us if we would be able to help in Florida and we got the okay from from upper management to provide assistance and we they gave us a date when they wanted us down there they didn't want us to be there during the hurricane itself they wanted us to leave as soon as it got through the issue with that is we also were coming back in with all the residents trying to get back in so the second day was a very long day for us trying to drive back through there were several small towns that it took us two hours to get through just because of the traffic. This is a picture of the group before we left we knew it was going to be a long journey so as you can see we were in shorts and we knew we weren't going to be working that day. There is a sign that at the entrance to the facilities in Ocala that thank you for all of the linemen that showed up. These are just some pictures of the damage as you can see the the one on the right there's a bucket truck that's driving through an actual flooded area that's the one good thing about having the large vehicles we can get those in some places that the smaller vehicles can't. Here's some more work at night there's a as you can see there's trees trees were everywhere we had tree trimmers there from all over that were helping assist also and that makes our job a lot easier because these guys aren't tree trimmers they're linemen you know that they're there to get the get the lines back up. Just some more pictures of damage you can see the one tree that fell across the shed a lot of it a lot of the work that we did was at night I mean we worked from six in the morning till ten at night every day a couple of days we went over you know because we were right at the point of getting somebody's power back on and there's no need and them being off all night if we can stay an hour or so extra. That's pretty much the end of the slideshow there was you know this is every time we go on one of these trips we always say this is this is probably one of the best groups and everything like that but I can I can honestly say this time the town that we went to Alcala there wasn't a day that went by that somebody didn't stop and give one of these groups either a cooler full of soda pops water G atorade I think every day we had at least one meal that somebody from the community brought out and fed the group so the the guys from Ocala they were working right alongside of us they worked those days as a matter of fact the last day we were there we helped do cleanup so that some of those guys could go spend a little time with their families and rest up because of the uncertainty of Maria and Jose that were coming in they they didn't know if they were going to get hit again so in this group we had no issues no issues whatsoever it's a great group of guys they did an outstanding job of representing Denton as is attested to by the numerous emails and stuff that I'm sure Todd that you 've received on this group and you know these guys enjoy it they love getting the lights back on and that's the thing at the end of the day whenever you're sitting there and it's pitch dark and all of a sudden you see lights popping on that means that they've done their job and they've done it well thank y'all for allowing us the opportunity to go and to represent Denton. Thank you for going and thanks for your families letting you go I worked for a utility in Minnesota I don't know if you guys know that and I know you're working in conditions that you are not used to and and how difficult that can be so I really appreciate your going and applaud you for doing maybe you even were working next to our old crews but thank you thank you very much for going. Thank you I want to stand up and give you guys a standing ovation. I think that you know electricity shows how connected we all are all over the country and you know those those lines are like veins and you know connecting all of us and they really are literally a life source for people so you guys are like emergency doctors saving multiple lives at a time and I'm just I'm amazed and in all what you do just every day not just this but thank you so much so glad to have this opportunity to recognize you. Thank you. And as they are exiting we'd like to also recognize the the groups that came in today at next Tuesday's council meeting so we'll be doing similar type presentation next Tuesday evening so just thank you all for your time on last allowing us to do that and recognizing those employees. Okay our next item is the electromagnetic inspection from Lake Louisville to here . Yes I'm going to do a brief introduction try to give you a little understanding well why are we doing this project and then I'll introduce our presenter. We have two raw water transmission lines between Lake Louisville and Lake Louisville water treatment plant. That plant is about 60% of the city's water treatment capacity. It's a twin pipeline system one first pipe was a 27 it was built in 1950 or excuse me at 56 and then the parallel pipe was the 30 inch that's the topic of our discussion today and that was built in 1975. We've had some failure history on the 30 inch pipeline. We had a failure probably pre-89 wasn't real well documented but we had some heavily corroded pipe two pipes were replaced. Then we had a series of more recent failures between about 2010 and 2015 that basically raised our awareness level and concern about the health and condition of the pipe. It's not a lot of technology available to help diagnose that. When the DCTA train was under construction we went out there and did a Sahara technology which was a tethered listening device. It only picks up active leaks so you have to have an active leak and you have to have a leak signature to pick it up. So that technology really didn't accurately pinpoint any real issues. In fact it went by an active leaking pipe that we weren't able to pick up so that was a discovery. We had two failures after that inspection with the DCTA in 2010. One of them we had to contend and deal with when the light rail was active. We did a presentation to the PUB back in 2013 when we encountered that problem and some of the challenges that we had and then more recently in 2015 when the interstate was replacing the two pipe sections, the two locations on the 27 they cut in found good pipe it wasn't an issue but on the 30 on the west side we encountered some similar bad pipe. So we've always been a little bit suspect over the last five years about the condition of this pipe and we've searched for available technologies and we selected Pure Technologies Inc. They're the patented provider of this technology. We went with a dewatered pipe inspection that was a robotics and the robotics went through and did electromagnetic which would pick up corrosion or broken bars within the pipe itself and then we also did the video and that's part of why we went robotic. Dewatered was the with a raw water environment we weren't really sure the closed circuit TV would give us very much to work with. So Brian Ellis is the project manager with Pure Technologies and he's got a brief presentation on what they found and then I'll do kind of a wrap-up of what are our next steps. So Brian. Thank you Tim. So I think what's I know it was just dumb luck but being able to kind of follow the a group of people and see how many resources it true it truly takes to oh sorry to and just use the arrow keys here I'm sure I 'm sorry to manage emergent situations when you're under the gun unfortunately pipes don't break on a you know Monday afternoon they break when it's raining and it's the middle of the night and you have your customers calling for a pipe failure so the goal of our inspection is to try and give people a heads up as to what the condition of their pipe is so they can start managing that asset proactively and not reactively. Just a little bit about Pure Technologies my name is Brian Ellis I was the project manager on this job my colleague Dave Kurtz has about 20 years of actually selling pipe in fact you were probably with G ifford Hill when this when this original pipeline was built but we do work all over the world here locally we do work for everyone you've heard of North Texas Dallas Austin San Antonio so we have a lot of experience our focus primarily is on the pre-stressed concrete pipe of which this bar wrap pipe is a type but we do a lot of work with metallic pipes as well. Just a real brief discussion of bar wrap pipe it's a type of pre-stressed concrete pipe this is just a cross section right here you basically have a steel cylinder with metal bars that provide a lot of the structural integrity around the cylinder and then it of course has a concrete mortar coating to protect those metallic pieces from corrosion. A few of the the specifics about concrete or about bar wrap pipe in particular is when you start having corrosion of that concrete protective coating it allows acidic groundwater any kind of corrosive environment to start to penetrate that and you start to get loss of the structural components. Of course as you break through the bars then you start getting into the metal cylinder and that's when you start to see leaks. Now one thing good about bar wrap pipe is because it's mild steel you don't typically have catastrophic failures there are a few other types of concrete pipe where you actually have the main breaks where it basically just catastrophically blows apart and Main Street is flooded. This will typically the signature of a corroding pipe for bar wrap is typically slow leaks progressing into moderate and then severe leaks. So the goals were basically to use our proprietary EM technology to not only look at the state of the bar wraps but also to look at the pipe wall thickness. We work out the great thing about our robotics technology as Tim mentioned was that we do provide a visual assessment of the inside of the pipe too and then using those things in tandem we're basically able to give you a full condition assessment of your pipe. The goal being is that a full replacement of this pipe is very expensive especially in where this pipe is as we'll see it's right next to that fancy hike and bike trail but even more so it's right next to a railroad it'd be a very costly replacement. We want to go in we want to identify your weak spots allow you to go in and replace just small sections of pipe and effectively increase the the usable life of that entire pipeline. This is where we make our money that's our robot we basically this is about 8.2 8 points a little over 8 miles of pipeline what we're able to do this is a tether tool that we bring in and insert through access manholes. Could you stay for the mic? Sorry I'm used to my wife telling me that I talk too loud so we're basically able to insert this tool into the access manholes and run all of our data collection and video both upstream and downstream to get a full assessment of the pipe. There's another view of our tool our data acquisition system and this is actually if you look here on the upper right hand corner that's actually where the money's made that's actually a detector that has 24 different separate detectors and effectively what we're doing is we're inducing a magnetic field into the pipe and then we're quickly measuring the response of that magnetic field and we're effectively doing a continuity test. When wires are in good shape they give us the signal and we have electrically continuous when they don't we know based on our experience that and we can estimate the number of wire breaks that are associated with that certain region and this is just this won't make any sense to you but you can see the perturbation in one of our sensors here and that to us highlights a section of pipe that we need to evaluate. So the D4 that's saying? Yes yes that's that's a typical signature of a non-continuous set of wires or bars in this case and this is just a another piece of our of our analyzed data that shows as we're going down we take the data and it's about a four to six week process where all the data gets analyzed by a group of trained technicians that know how to filter out the data and tell us exactly how many wire breaks and where they are in your system. This is not your pipe I just want to highlight that this is actually from Flower Mound but you can see here where based on verification we we found some some some issues with their pipe and we excavated the pipe and you can see where the structural components of these bars have been have been basically removed so this pipe is in really bad shape. This is basically what we do once we identify pipe we can then go and support Tim's group to go excavate locate and then we run additional tools to make sure that we're on the right pipe. The worst thing we can do is give you a false positive or a false negative so we are always aimed to be on site whenever we start doing some of these field validations. You can see here some additional damage I believe this is also Flower Mound right so this is where we've come in we've excavated confirm that it's the right pipe so then the decision can be made about replacement point repairs but we we work with with Tim's group to identify what's most cost effective. Here is basically some longitudinal cracking this can be due to improper bedding when the pipeline was was built it can be due to source loading from the top I know one concern here was now that we have an active railway near our line and there was some modifications that were done by DCTA recently making sure that we don't run into this case because you can build pipelines to have trains run over them but it's difficult when they come in after the fact very similar to the build out of I-35 there just making sure that the loading condition is still proper. Now I mentioned that once you start losing your bars which is a big part of your structural integrity you can then start getting wall loss in your cylinder. Now this is a prime example of wall loss we can we can measure up to 50% wall loss or I guess the correct word would be down to 50% if you have 10% of your wall thickness at this point our technology does not do that but anything 50% and above wall loss we can we can measure. So this is specifically the line that we did I know the north arrow is kind of in a weird spot but you can see down here to your lower right hand corner that's the intake out of Lake Louisville and it effectively runs right up underneath I-35 just north of the of the lake and then essentially follows the hike and bike trail all the way to the plant and here in green I mentioned that we had multiple insertions we basically would take the tool run it upstream pull the tool back and then run it downstream from star to star effectively. Now for what you really came for this was the results of our inspection we had two sections here that we or two pipes two specific pipes where we identified five wire breaks that's also a minimum in our inspection technology to measure if you have one wire break that's really difficult for us to see because of the additional noise in the data but down to five wire breaks we're very confident in and you can see here just on the east side of 35 there and then up here near just south of Colorado Boulevard the red is where we found two pipes that had five wire breaks. I mentioned we can also do wall loss and we have we have I believe it was total nine nine or ten sections where we had wall loss. Now there are a few different types of wall loss but these are all things that should be in investigated some could be as a result of a point repair in the past some are associated with features like air release valves things like that potential issues with joints and then some but it's all something that we want to highlight to you. So as I mentioned we had we did 8.62 miles of pipe starting just upstream with a pump station there at Lake Louisville and proceeding all the way to just outside of the plant there. Thirteen hundred and seven or it was a total of thirteen hundred nineteen pipes thirteen hundred and seven pipes were okay we had two pipes that we had five wire breaks and ten with cylinder corrosion. So we're telling you that out of this length of pipe you have less than 1% with any measurable damage to it. So the takeaway from here is we don't want you guys to go out and pull up eight miles of pipe. Right now this is a much more manageable situation and we would certainly recommend in the future addressing these issues going and validating these issues and we'll work with with Tim's team to prioritize which ones we want to take a look at because even point repairs are not free. Manage those and then you've effectively kind of put yourself pipes never going to be a new condition right but you've certainly managed it a lot better than just pull and replace. That's about it just in in in general I do a lot of work with pipe and I want to say a couple things one the pipeline was very well designed including these sections that have been modified the access is is great to it but operationally you know you guys have done a really good job with your scour procedures and things like that. So just kind of give you a quick wrap up we've got to do some spot investigations and figure out what our repairs are based on our prior history we're probably looking at removing and replacing pipe. These pipe sections are pretty heavy they 32 foot long and so accessibility within that corridor is a real challenge. The last repair we did was actually about 30 foot from a roadway. We had to shut the roadway down just to get the truck in to unload the pipe. So this is going to be a little bit of a challenge for staff to go in and do this investigation but we do have some priorit ization. We initially budgeted about 10 million which was a big big guess for replacement repair whatever that was. If we had significant problems with the pipe to where the point repair strategy was questionable we had budgeted to have engineering analysis done engineering design and package it up and put it out to bed because we've had a little more favorable results a smaller percentage of the pipe appears to be you know of immediate concern right now. We can try to schedule this we're going to attempt to do this with in- house resources we'll see how that goes. We've scaled the budget down to about 4 million that may be in excess of what we need we'll see where we land on that. The other issue gets into the other pipeline which is 20 years older the 27 . We haven't really had the history of failure on it but we are looking at potentially doing a similar investigation probably about 2020. We'll see if that technology approach makes sense for that pipe and the mode of failures that we've seen with them so that's kind of where we're at. All right thank you. Out of the 10 and whatever 10 and 2 thank you which is the worst than the corrosion already occurring? Probably the bar breaks we've experienced some failures where the bars haven't corroded through but the cylinder has and so some of the heavily corroded pipe that we've removed that was an active leak then you know the corroded bars appear to be probably the more severe and so they became the two priorities. I'm not exactly sure if they're the most accessible location so we may try to pick some areas where it's a little easier to get to and we can verify what we see because if we have to get down into the middle of the rail trail and have to remove and replace a section of that trail system that'll be a bigger project. And the in the report did a hierarchy of prioritization based on this condition. Any other questions? Are there any cont iguous sections or all individual pipe sections? Well the pipe was all built in pieces and most of them are long pieces with the smaller fittings so I'm not sure if I've answered your question. When you start digging holes you're gonna have to dig 12 different holes or you're gonna have one? No we actually have GPS pinpointing to get down real close to the specific pipe and then as Brian mentioned they have an active interest in proof testing their technology so they'll come out and try to use above the pipe technologies and ultimately you may end up having to chip away the concrete to see the problem. Are some of the top priority pipe sections located around the train track? I think the two with the wire brakes are under the rail trail next to the DCTA so accessibility is going to be a challenge. We have I think some sections that are actually away from the rail trail that are in open areas where we can access and they're probably not high priority from a condition standpoint but they might be high priority from an accessibility standpoint. Any other questions? Thank you Tim. Thank you. Let's see in the next one is receive a report and discussion on the credit and collection policy. Good morning ladies and gentlemen I'm Tiffany Thompson the customer service manager and today we're going to talk about the credit and collection policies that we have in place for utilities customer service. So a little bit of background this ordinance 2010-292 was adopted and improved in November of 2010 and it was a direct result of a Navigant consulting group that came in to look at just a lot of our business processes and what was going on and they specifically focused on credit and collections for us and so some of the things that that came up from that consultant is that our uncollectible debt was very high considering how small of our utility was and so the contributing factors to that bad debt was an effective customer credit screening we didn 't have that in place and equity and that pardon me deposit policies and just overall ineffective collection efforts and so prior to implementation we had 1.4 million dollars worth of uncollectible debt and then in 09- 10 we had one point million one point one million dollars and so the purpose of the ordinance was to reduce that uncollectible debt by implementing fair credit and collection practices and making sure that we were also verifying customers identity and collecting adequate deposits on accounts based off the account that they were signing for service for so for fiscal year 15-16 our utility debts has now gone down to five hundred and thirty six thousand dollars compared to that one point four million that it was and so this presentation is just going to go over some of those results that the ordinance achieved for us so I'm going to go through this presentation is I'm going to focus on our active collections so how our customers come into the utility system how they progress to the utility system what programs and offerings we have for them and then get into how we handle accounts once they've finaled out and they go into that uncollectible status and then some things that we have coming for our customers so starts out with the active credit collection timeline on day one we issue the bill day 16 that bill is due on day 25 we're going to give you a friend friendlier minor call letting you know that a payment hasn't been received on day 28 to 29 a late fee and overdue interest would be placed on the account and then the second bill would be generated on day 30 and that's going to include a disconnection notice to let them know that there 's an unpaid balance and it's subject for disconnection at this point on day 34 we're going to do another proactive courtesy call to let you know about the balance and then day 37 the account would be subject for disconnection and if payment or reconnect is not received then we would close the account on day 44 so credit screenings I'm going to talk about new customers coming in and then how we assess customers as they establish tenure with us one of the things that we did not have prior to ordinance 2010 to 92 was a way to verify the customers identity whenever they came into the system and then also assess what type of customers are coming to our utility system so with that we charge every single customer a deposit who came into the utility system previously with that news $150 and it didn't cover the normal usage that was occurring at the address so everyone was charged this deposit and we weren't ver ifying identity so with the ordinance when it went into place we started leveraging a program called online utility exchange and what they do is they verify identity and they also give us a score for that customer not only based off of their credit score but also based off of any unpaid balances they may have left with other utilities so it is really specific to our industry as well and so you can see that 70% of our customers coming into the system are good or fair pairing customers so that means 41% of our customers do not have to pay a deposit at all the 29% may have to pay one up to one month worth of deposit and then the remaining 30% would pay up to two months of what the usage is at that specific address that they're going to and I'm going to talk about ways that we can work with our customers and avoid deposits as well coming up so for existing customers as they start establishing tenure with us we want to continue to monitor how they're doing so we have internal credit rating you see a through Z just so you know Z just means that we haven't billed that account so whenever I first saw that was like Z I don't want to be Z customer but that just means they haven 't billed yet for in the account and so 86% of our customers in our current utility system consistently pay on time and then we have about 11% that we want to make sure that we have adequate deposit coverage for them so deposit assessments and refunds one of the things prior to this ordinance implementation is we didn't have an effective way to make sure that we were run refund ing deposits what type of deposits we had on accounts we really didn't have a balance there and so what the ordinance provided to us was specific policy on how we 're going to refund deposits too because the goal is not to have too little too too much but just to have just enough on our accounts and so for July 2016 through January 2017 to present 14,000 of our customers have received a deposit refund 71% of those customers got their refund on their final bill that means that we need to keep that deposit on the account until they closed out the account and I wanted to note that 57% of those deposits refunded on the final bill actually paid off their entire balance so they didn't have to pay those last two months that they had so they were able to walk away with either having it completely paid or and sometimes actually a credit refund to them and then almost 4,000 of our customers during that same time period got our deposit refund without closing their account so that's showing that we're proactively looking at the account to make sure that we have the right deposit amount on there and so we've refunded those to the accounts we currently have about 21% of our customer base that have deposits on file with us and so there's ways to have a deposit waived when you're a new customer coming into our system you can provide a letter of credit from a previous utility saying that you were good standing with them we also do co-signers or someone can co-sign on your account if you want to sign up for credit or debit card or checking draft will weigh the deposit for you as well for that way and then if those options don't work for you we also offer deposit payment arrangements so this is where if you can't pay the entire deposit upfront we will split it out over three months for you there's been circumstances where we've gone longer depending on what that customer needed so we really try to work with them to give them options for that and so for that same time period we offered about 3100 deposit payment arrangements so payment behavior one of the things that was pinpointed was the number of delinquent accounts that we had and so the late fee through counsel direction was increased from ten dollars to twenty dollars and we immediately saw started seeing the decrease in delinquent accounts at 29 percent month after month and so you can see from 2010 to now we've decreased the number of delinquent accounts that we have significantly and also that's with a 9% increase in our customer base with that so that's actually a genuine good influencer on the the late payment being increased that way so discontinuance of service this is absolutely I want to note the last thing that we want to have to do on a customer's account but we wanted to show you this is the credit timeline that I started with with that but if we haven't received a payment or customers contacted us for a payment arrangement on day 37 the account goes into a disconnected status and we've notified the customer on four occasions prior to that disconnect notice and we've done that first bill the friendly reminder call the second bill with the notice of disconnect ion and then also on day 34 with that courtesy call and I wanted to note with those two different call types that we do we have a press one to pay option so if the customer gets that call and they're on the phone they hear that they 're able to press one make a payment we have a 30% response from our customers with those two different phone calls with that so a lot of times our customers are waiting for those phone calls to make payment as well and on the left hand side over here I wanted to point out this is just some different areas on our bill whenever you get that second bill notification that says pay me to avoid disconnection at top and at bottom and also as you progress to the system and create your tenure if you have late fees or events on your account we 're going to give you a special message on there letting you know a late fees benefits on the account you know remit your payment so you don't have a deposit that's in essence what's that saying because we want to make sure they're aware if I continue to to pay late or have events on the account that this is what could happen if I don't already have adequate deposit coverage on the account so with the ordinance also we wanted to make sure that there was clear payment expectations set up and so this is actual a copy of the back of our bill that we have with all the different ways that you can pay we have over two dozen locations that you can pay anywhere there were there's a fidelity express money gram we have a 24/7 hour kiosk now a drive-up dropbox and most recently we launched a new payment portal payments us where there's new and added features that customers can pay they can set up reoccurring credit and debit card which was not an option a couple of months ago they also can schedule payments so if they know I'm getting paid on Friday they can go in today schedule that payment for Friday now and that's a new option as well and I wanted to note that on our previous portal that we had where you could log in and view your bill we only had about 6300 customers registered for that and in the two months of this has been live we have almost 12,000 customers registered so you can see that there's a very quick adoption to this and people are really liking our customers are really enjoying the additional features that it has and so again we want to continue to add additional payment options and features for our customers to be able to pay so now I'm going to shift to uncollectible debt so this is when the account goes into a final status we generate a bill on day 16 that bill is due on day 33 we do a proactive phone call to let you know that there's still an outstanding balance left and we actually get a 37% response rate on that one phone call alone so 37% of our customers pay once they get that phone call and then on day 40 they get a collection letter letting them know there's still a balance we offer payment arrangements please contact us or make payment and we have a 33% response rate on that on the collection letter prior to going to collections so day 60 to 119 we're doing those calls specifically with those accounts that may be over five hundred dollars to let them know that this is potentially going collections and then day 120 it does go to collections and then finally after day 180 we deem that uncollectible debt and it's written off with that so you can see how the that the policies and processes have influenced our debt over the last several years and another item to note is we actually reduce the amount of accounts that go to collections by 87% just through in-house resources because again the intent is not to send them to collections we don't want them to send them to collections we want to give them every opportunity possible to make payment or payment arrangement with us prior to that so in addition to making sure that we have good payment channels expectations that we work with our customers we give them payment arrangements we want to make sure that there's established programs for those people that that need help financial assistance and so we do have the plus one program which is prevent loss of utility services and what that program does is the city allocates a certain amount of money a hundred thousand dollars a year to be able to help families in interfaith ministries overse es the contract for that right now and fourteen thousand dollars of that goes to the administrative costs for interfaith ministries and the rest of the eighty six thousand dollars goes to helping our the families and so with that increased funding over the years we've been able to help more families and increase the amount when we help them so previously was a hundred seventy six dollars a month and now I'm pardon me not a month but when we help them it's a hundred and sixty seventy six dollars a month and now it's up to three hundred and thirty two dollars and I do want to note that our September data hasn't come in yet but we're anticipating that to be about two hundred and twenty to two hundred thirty families helped this fiscal year so with this we wanted to open up conversations with plus one to make sure are we helping as many families as possible and why are people being denied when they do go into plus one or pardon me interfaith ministries to get assistance and we found that eighty eight percent of the customers going in do get denied for that and so we wanted to really kind of drill down as to why that's happening and there are some criteria in our current contract one of those is they cannot get more than assistance more than once in a 12 month period but there is a caveat and they're saying unless there's extreme circumstances and interfaith ministries was taking kind of a hard stance on that because they wanted to help as many people as possible with that in addition and other reasons why people are turned down is the applicant doesn't show up for the appointment they don't provide the documentation that's needed or they don't need assistance any longer and so two specific opportunities that we have here is being able to assist those customers more than once in a 12 month period and then also another part of the criteria in the contract is based off of tenure if a customer hasn't been an address more than six months they weren't helping them they were again trying to help more families and there's autonomy to make a decision on that so in discussions with with interfaith we're like let's help as many people as possible with us so we're able to address that and then also the contract is actually expiring with interfaith December of this year and so that'll allow us to incorporate your feedback and the council's feedback on any of the criteria that we may want to change or whatever feedback you may have in regards to that whenever our customers again and we've worked with them on payment arrangements we've told them about the plus one program we also want to let them know about other hail help agents my Texan accent came out just other help agencies that customers have available to them that are not funded through the city and so this is not an all-inclusive list but I think it's very worthy to note that these agencies that help almost 1200 of our customers with payments up to almost $150,000 this fiscal year so we work very closely with these agencies making sure that they have the proper documentation that they know what the customer needs are so we can be able to help them and we document those pledges and payments on the accounts to avoid any type of interruption of services for our customers while they're working with those help agencies so other things that we have coming down the pipe that we 're really excited about for solutions for our customers is a prepaid metering program and what this is this is a page-you-go type of model for utilities works just like the prepaid cell phone and it was very exciting again about this is this is going to shift the conversation with our customers so versus the postpaid environment that we have now they'll be in a prepaid environment and it'll avoid any deposits late fees due dates they'll be able to have more control over that and greater flexibility with that as well and so we're testing that right now it's in a testing integration phase with the with a go live anticipate go live in May of 2018 I wanted to highlight the screenshot right over here this is readers account I'm gonna give Rita five bucks after this meeting disconnected this is a live account that we're testing for Rita and it's showing that she's being notified that hey if you don't make a minimum payment of $4.59 you're gonna be disconnected with that that's extremely manageable for a customer who may be you know struggling to pay a bill I could do five dollars I can do ten dollars something interesting with the readings account is she was an existing customer of ours and she had a balance owing on the account and so we're gonna be able to work with our existing customers and say you have a balance on your account if you have a deposit let's refund the deposit to the bill if there's anything still outstanding we can put that in what we call a debt recovery module and so we'll put that in a debt recovery right now Rita has 183 81 a debt recovery and a percentage of every payment that she makes is gonna go down to paying off that debt and so she's never gonna incur new debt with this system she's gonna be paying off that debt that she has and then creating that credit on her account with that so again that helps our customer current customers that are in the utility system maybe working with them on getting their deposit refunded putting them in a debt recovery module and helping them work through that and there's multiple notifications that you can get there's a mobile application there's text messages there on the left-hand bottom of the screen you can see the different type of activities that have happened so you don't have to log into a portal to manage this you can do it on your phone you can call on us to make a payment but another interesting thing about this is that you can see that your daily usage and what that daily usage cost and this is for all of our customers all of our residential customers this is new customers coming into the system and our existing customers so there isn't a target customer base that we're reaching for this it really is for all of our customers so we're really excited about that program to come on board so takeaways and recommendations based off the results that we've seen with the implementation of the ordinance and specifically being able to continue to work with our customers through those you know one-off situations where they need additional help and payment arrangements and making sure that they know the resources that are available to them staff is recommending that the ordinance stay intact based off the results that we're seeing and then in efforts to increase assistance to more families to address those two opportunities I talked about with plus one about the tenure at the address and also with helping more than once in a 12 month period and then incorporating any feedback that you and City Council may have into the contract request for proposal that will go out in a couple months and then that with the prepaid program coming on board continuing to offer those solutions more robust solutions for our customers to be able to have more autonomy and management of their accounts with that so in addition to the city's core values customer services mission is to help serve and educate and we take great pride in treating our customers with dignity and respect whenever they're working through whatever situation they are going through and so we appreciate the continued support that the board provides us and council provides us to be able to do that so I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have does this include single-family and multifamily yes and commercial on we have some data on the on specifically on commercial in the review that I provided which which part are you asking on just your total debt yes does include commercial so the 1.4 million and the five hundred thirty six thousand that we're at right now that does include all commercial okay so just for understanding so do you do you have an idea of what percentage of the debt collection is commercial and what percentage is multifamily versus single-family we can I don't have that here today but we can break that down I was just I don't that doesn't really have any effects for me on the recommendation but I'm just curious to see one of the reason I'm curious is it would seem that I don't know if you do you all go so far as putting the lien on residential no the lanes are not applicable for residential we've only done those for commercial and I think we have three accounts right now that have lanes on them and they really it only really works when that commercial entity is ready to sell and we've collected I think eighty nine hundred dollars to date on that so that's I pointed that out and in the review that it's not necessarily effective but it is one additional way to help and those are specifically on the commercial okay that doesn't have any bearing on I think your recommendation is good but doesn't have me I was just curious I'm impressed with the change that that you've seen over the time period and I know how hard it is working some some families just have a real hard time some days and just need the help now state of Texas doesn't have any energy assistance programs or anything like that it's usually comes through the faith communities yeah for us because we're governed by the PUB and those are mainly for the retail segment that we see like TXU reliant they have some of those different programs like light up Texas I think was one with that we rely on the the plus one program and then the various health agencies that are across the state and locally for us there you there used to be a statewide assistance program that was recently canceled okay did you have another question did oh yeah okay yeah so first of all thank you for giving this presentation and and this is as a result of my having raised this issue in my my first PUB meeting I understand that this policy with the deposits and the and the disconnection and the the timeline and credit ratings has been effective in as I understand it reducing the 1.4 million in uncollected down to about half is that correct yeah so by about half so I understand that benefit my concern and the reason why I'm opposed to many aspects of this ordinance is because of the cost to actual Denton families who even the ones who end up as you say you know many people who make the deposits they end out using that deposit money to pay right so and but anytime somebody who does not have a disposable income puts down money up front they're sacrificing somewhere else to and you know I don't think it takes that much imagination on our part to understand how how that ends up happening so if you get somebody to pay the deposit it means they're not they 're gonna be laid on a credit card which means their ratings gonna get worse or they're not gonna pay be able to pay a medical bill etc and we've got a lot of people living hand-to-mouth here and so what I don't like about this is that for the savings of you know five hundred something thousand were making a number of people's lives really miserable and and you can see in one in one of the attachments that came with with the item for today there was a kind of year-by-year chart on that number of disconnections and you can see the number of disconnections increase from 2014 2015 to 15 16 and 16 17 at the same time as those as you know uncollected debt you know delinquent accounts or problems are going down so there's there's that side to it and so I have a couple a number specific questions based on kind of input that I've gotten from from people I've gotten a lot of feedback from rate payers one of whom and I will just read what what she writes she says and this is talking about the credit ratings how the credit ratings are used to establish whether someone needs to pay according to the certain instead you know it puts them in one of these three categories someone says I want to know what credit score they use when I first moved to Denton despite having a 750 credit score which is that's pretty good you know 800 they said my credit score was low and I needed to pay a deposit they said it's from Experian but not your act not your actual score but some random others score that we have no access to and they refuse to supply and then somebody else writes this happened to me too this is this is on social social media this happened to me too my credit score was in the low 700s pretty good and they said they didn't use that score that there was a score they used that didn't have to do with online scores I said what then to top that off I could etc etc so I'm wondering you know what what credit scores are are being used if not the ones that that we ourselves have access to in addition to Experian we utilize the online utility exchange that does use Experian credit scores in addition to utility industry if a customer has left a balance at another utility their payment history with another utility so it's combining that in addition to the credit score and giving them a score for for risk for us if we do charge a deposit on an account we do provide what 's called an adverse letter to the customer where they can actually find out more information in regards to how that credit score came up and so we do provide it's a two-page letter let them know what their score came back as and some of the factors that may contribute to that and so we provide that to them so if those customers if we can go I think we might be able to go back in and look at the specific accounts and we can provide make sure that they got that letter and if they didn't but it we don't want to get into the business of getting into someone's credit score as to why it is that score we present the information that were provided based off of utility industry and their credit score with that but it does give them based off the fair credit trade act information on how they can find out additional information on that so that's how that that score is come is created and presented to us and Tiffany they can get a letter from their prior utility or a co-signer to waive the deposit also so you know they just bring in a letter that says I wasn't good standing before yeah the problem of court and I understand and appreciate that you know the problem of course for for for working working poor people is that you know many of them can't get such a letter because it is so hard to pay and so just in the pragmatics of everyday life you know and these are not people who are mismanaging their money and just because life is so expensive and rent is so high that you know they prioritize their spending and so they're gonna wait you know if you have to pay $200 you're gonna wait till just before and often even just after your power gets turned off to to pay it so and we do offer I mean I talked about that but the payment arrangers if someone needs help paying out a deposit we offer that and just to go back on the disconnected on the residential accounts that does fluctuate dependent on whether so you we can have a real drastic drop in which we did for a couple years because if it's extremely hot outside we're not going to disconnect power so that greatly influences how many disconnects we may have with that and so I wanted to point that out that that 's very weather contingent for our disconnects as well yeah and that I understand and I saw that and appreciated that that chart yeah so I and I appreciate the calls and the notifications too and you know I would like to to see some you know what what staff thinks the effect would be if we had just had an an open grace period and no no disconnection if if we didn't disconnect people for for late payment at all if we only disconnected for for safety for safety reasons or because electricity was no longer being used there I think that this would also do a lot you know at the cost of you know whatever this five you know five hundred thousand that we're saving I think this would do so much to improve DME's reputation with the public you know a lot of people when they think DME they're not necessarily thinking of our you know hero lin emen who are who we saw come out here and who do so much to keep like electricity on they're thinking of the bills that they have to pay that they keep piling up you know for me it's not a problem to you know I didn't have to pay deposit if I did that wouldn't have been a problem but for other people that's the this you know that means you can't can't give bring your kids to the doctor you can't make your car payment you know poor people have the worst credit ratings and it's just I feel like it just perpetuates economic problems that we have in this city so I feel like it would be good for our for DME's reputation for our local economy also the the reconnection fee I know that I've heard it from anecdotally that private that many private utilities will not charge for a reconnection fee when you have to when you move from one address within that utility to another address you know what I mean so I wonder connect fee connect me sorry sorry sorry not yeah not not reconnection fee sorry connect me connect me so for instance somebody and because because poor people tend to move move more on average you know within the same city then middle and upper class people you have people you know moving to another address and then having to put down a whole other deposit so I would love to see that looked into as you know changing that policy to be more like that of other companies who just once you pay to connect with DME and if you move to another apartment that uses DME you don't have to pay that again so those are just some things well those are my questions and things I would like for you to consider but anyway thank you so much and thank you also for dealing with there was another family who had come to me and you were really helpful in helping work through their problem and they they appreciate that I think a lot of people don't know because they see a bill and they want it the last thing they want to do is ask the people who are charging them for help so you know there's a lot that I think that that we can do here on pub to spread the word but thank you I I would I'm not sure how much the well anyway that's I guess for discussion that's the last of a question so thank you thank you very much and thank you for answering my question I would like to see more about the those those credit score ratings what a letter like that would look like maybe I could request my own yeah I think it's a copy we can copy of what the adverse letter looks like that would be excellent yeah because people are really confused because they think they have good credit rating because of the number they have so thank you very much okay and any other questions thank you Tiffany thank you okay the next items are on the consent agenda and looks like most of those are routine IT maintenance contracts or the items we've discussed but having said that any board members want an item pulled yes no I would like item I pulled from the consent agenda not for I don't know if that means that it has to have a separate discussion this is just because I it would then if I pull it does it mean there has to be a whole discussion on it or it can just be voted on separately without a discussion okay great thank you yeah then I would like any others all right do we have a motion to prove items a through H second all in favor I'm opposed okay and then item I you don't have a question you just want to separate vote okay all right do we have a motion to approve I to move all in favor I opposed abstain abstain abstaining okay all right items for individual consideration item a approval of the minutes does everybody had an opportunity to review those any changes and they stand approved as presented and item B consider recommending approval of contract with quality excavation limited I guess nobody wanted to see my presentation they all don't take it personally gonna be exciting so good morning I'm Chris Lutrick with DME and I have a short presentation here to highlight some of the information that was provided in your in your backup information there this is for IFB 6503 it's the Den energy center phase two water and sewer improvements so today I'll be going over the public improvement requirements for the Den energy center phase one waterline summary that issues already come before the board and we've already completed that project phase two water and sewer project map and that 's probably will I'll do the most discussion and kind of show you where everything is is that the bid summary and any questions and feel free to stop me at any time if you have a question the dead energy center located out west of the airport had some through the through the the design review portion of the project some public improvements came up so of course she needs sanitary sewer and water at the plant so the the first item here is a looped city water main to feed the plant fire loop so what we had is the dinner just any your energy center is located an area where the city does not have a lot of infrastructure it's it's right on the on the western edge of the city's resources so this loop loop requirement will provide water from two directions and a key component of that is it eliminated the need for a large diesel fired fuel pump at the Denton energy center so without a looped water main feed we would have had to put a very large water tank and a fire pump so in the event of a fire that system would kick in to to put out the fire a city water main tap for the plants raw water so that's part of phase two that will provide the potable water supply wash down water and cooling water for the plant and then finally the connection to the sanitary sewer so there's showers bathrooms other facilities for the workers at the plant so it needed a sewer connection for that phase one waterline summary vertical construction of the Denton energy center required fire water to be on site so when we analyzed the project and as you'll see on the next slide getting water to the plant was was was a pretty big task so the project was divided into two phases phase one was a the shorter phase and it was less complex so we brought that to the board that was an RFP that was awarded to Wilson contractors out of Denton construction was completed in early May 2017 and the big thing was it allowed us it kept our plan on schedule so we got the the fire water loop pressurized and we were able to go vertical with the building as scheduled okay so to orient you here like I said we're west of west of the airport you can see the airport down here this is Jim Crystal Road 380 would be to the north a couple miles and I 35 would be to the east a couple miles so we'll start with phase one it's the yellow line down here at the bottom so we made a connection on Tom Cole Road to an existing water main right off the edge of the airport property and we came on to the city's property and this yellow line that I'm following is phase one so that was about 5, 000 feet of pipe and that was completed in in May 2017 and then the blue line here is the fire water loop so we were actually we built to that point and charged the fire water loop and construction continued so on phase two we have the sanitary sewer so that's the Scion line here so it comes it connects to the plant facilities near the water connection point run south and then continues over across the airport so to the east side of the airport so we had to we had to coordinate this with the FAA and the Dent Enterprise Airport we have some specific construction requirements safety requirements it must be met times a day that we can work to comply with the FAA's regulations and you also notice like any developer when you put in any kind of public works you have to build for the future so this line that runs to the south extends the sanitary sewer to the property line so developer would develop this track to the south would have access to the sanitary sewer so on to phase two waterline so we're going to start here and end up here so as you can tell it's going to be a very very simple project this is a 12 inch water line we'll connect to the to phase two and it'll come up north of the plant extend over to the property line and run to just south of Jim Crystal so again you'll notice we carry the utility to the to the western edge of the property for future development along Jim Crystal it will then turn to the east and we'll stay just south of the Jim Crystal right away and it'll carry continue all the way over to Mosh Branch so being that we have a deadline on the plant we've asked the contractor to start on the sanitary sewer and in a second crew we'll start here in this red circle and we'll build up to the the plants tab so what that allows us to do is be ready to to operate the plant in the spring and it takes some pressure off the contractor to build to finish this loop all the way over here so with this initial construction we'll be able to to give raw water to the plant any questions I know that was a lot can you say more about the the future development expected around Jim Crystal no that the if there is so kind of a general thing that we've done we've done it on McKinney Street substation is any developer that comes in and develops a track of land so say the the water line is just to your east you can't just build the line to your facilities what you have to do is you have to continue that on to the next property line so that's a way that cities like Denton they get public infrastructure built so it's the cost of the developer to carry the the public water line to the edge of their property so any future there's houses out there then they would be I mean it's once we're done with it it's a it's a city asset so we turn it over to the water department and and we're just building it for them in essence okay yes I understand I was just wondering if there was specific development that you know ma'am I would know okay thank you thank you in case there is they'll have it though I was stuff out there anything else yes sir and I stepped out for a minute so maybe I missed this but the recommendation is for the alternative bid is there yes sir when we when we set this up we we got with the city water department and so they asked to include an upsize as the main bid so I believe Tim I think it's starting here and it's the the 16 inch pipe correct from here yeah to here would be upsized to 20 inch so the the main bid and was for the 20 inch pipe and then an alternate bid is for the 16 inch pipe so the way that works is DME would pay for the 16 inch portion and then the difference between the 16 inch and the 20 inch the water department has funds an upsize charge fund that they would fund that part of it so they're gonna go ahead and do it no sir they as in the write-up mr. Fisher determined that the cost for the upsize was was high per foot and so he elected not to ups ize and go that so therefore the alternate bid is what will be constructed okay all right anything else any other questions do we have a motion no okay did second all in favor all right I opposed abstain abstain okay well thank you for your time thank you ACM update thank you in your packet there are several items that are included for the ACM update we've included a a an article that was provided by PS Aurora to recognize didn't for its efforts we've included some previous reports that were requested by the board members website analytics in there as well if you'd like to take a look at that the other thing too is some board members had requested to give the board a heads up or a future notice regarding consult consultants as they would come forward for presentations and an upcoming board meeting we thought we'd take that step for further by including a future agendas worksheet in your agenda so that if you can see if you were to click on that link it does not it has future dates it's not currently populated we'll be working to populate those things so it'll be an effort upon staff to plan obviously plan ahead and incorporate that for future board meetings so that way it gives the board members an idea of what's coming forward whether it's the next board meeting or a future board meetings and please keep in mind that those things do come do are subject to change based on consultants or bid availability and things of that nature but just to kind of give you an idea of what's what's to come in future board meetings and then the last thing I would like to say is where's two more things one thing is I did notice on the new business matrix item number seven there was supposed to be a memo for ordinance on right of way in person your right of entry I was mistaken I thought that was going to be included in this meeting and it's we'll have a memo for the board in the next meeting so I apologize on that error for making that's fine this covers some I mean I would like to see that okay the right of entry to you okay but this covers so much that's connected with that okay okay well we'll still go ahead and include the right of entry component and the last item just on the new business matrix item number 12 there was requests made about having all proposed expenditures to be brought forward under individual consideration and and I think from staff perspective we'd like to have a conversation with the pub as a whole to get some guidance on that and certainly like today there are a number items that were routine in nature that were that were approved by consent and but we want to make sure that we're appropriately populating the agenda in accordance with the with the board's wishes so if those things are so we'd like to bring a work session to you if you if you see fit about that just to get direction from the board whether it's to continue the methodology that we've been doing to incorporate those routine nature items for consent or do you want to have everything on individual consideration we just want to get some guidance I'm not interested in seeing everything for individual consideration if it's a routine maintenance type item we had a previous discussion or a work session on it those are the kinds of things that I think should be on a consent agenda and maybe it'd be helpful if you tell us how you go about it and then get some direction from the board okay we can do that I wanted to thank you for bringing that discussion to PUB I'm looking forward to having that discussion and I see us as a kind of a vetting committee for council so I understand the council doesn't have the time to consider every single item and and we don't we don 't have the time to spend an equal amount of time on every item but I think it 's definitely worth discussing see if we want to put a price tag on it you know to say anything over 50,000 even just to have somebody from staff say just a reminder here's what this is all about any questions now before you vote you know that's that's the kind of thing that I would like to see us discuss but I 'm just looking forward to hearing what everyone else in this committee thinks discussing it so thank you thank you and I wanted under this item I think that Barbara Russell had previously been elected the secretary to this board and under the Charter we might need to look at that and then have this board elect a secretary okay we'll look into that right away okay thank you does that mean that she's the one who would take the notes no no no no you just act as I know the charter yeah yeah yeah no no we we have Kim for that we have a blessing for that okay then concluding items this is the area where anybody from the public are present here can bring up another item yes I wanted to see some some data on the in terms of topography geography you know district by district the those three credit categories by which deposits are required you know I would like to see a map of where the where clusters are of the people who pay those deposits versus you know the the 70% that doesn't it doesn 't have to be extraordinarily detailed but I just want a sense of you know areas I think that would be helpful for all of us because well and I would also like to see some sort of you know census data on that specifically in terms of race and ethnicity I know that you know nationwide that that people of color tend to have lower credit ratings because of you know doing part two I mean things that are improving now you know we all remember the subprime you know the mortgage issues and all those things that on the one hand have nothing to do with utilities but that affects credit rating and that affects this and so I I would like to see that to to see exactly who who this policy is is affecting so I think that would be helpful then I I assume this is more kind of question that the the the issue of the contract with interfaith for plus one she mentioned that that this is me is coming up for renewal in December so is that something that will just that will just come before us and then agenda yeah I don't have to do anything to request that okay great I'll be interested for a discussion on that and to tag on that I'd like to see a work session on that prior to a vote so that we can provide a little more feedback yes yeah I agree yeah I agree and I you know I hope we you know continue this conversation about this this policy I believe it's going before councils is that right yeah so I I really think that we need to have I mean most of our council really needs to hear from the citizens who are affected by these these policies so you know what what the car what is ice as I see it the cost is of this you know half a million in in savings because I hear all kinds of stories and I I don't think everybody is necessarily hearing those stories so it'd be great to be able to have people come in and tell their stories to council can we have pub doesn't have public hearings right is that yeah so thank you anything else all right motion to adjourn all favor